Payments - Overview

You can set up your Wild Apricot account to accept online payments for various transactions on your website – membership dues, event registration, donation, and other invoice payments. For membership dues, you can set up recurring payments – automatically charge credit cards on a regular basis – depending on your payment system. You can also manually record offline payments – payments received outside of Wild Apricot (e.g. check, cash, wire transfer, or credit card payments charged outside of Wild Apricot). Every payment recorded in Wild Apricot automatically generates a receipt.

You can look up recorded payment details, run payment reports, and process refunds. A refund can be processed manually by an administrator or automatically when Wild Apricot receives a refund notification from your online payment processor.

Payments can be classified by tender – the method by which payment was received. For online payments, tender is recorded automatically (e.g. Online - Authorize.Net credit card payment). For manual payments, you can select the tender when the payment is recorded (e.g. Cash or Checking account). You can customize the list of tenders as needed. For more information, see Payment tenders.

Payments not yet fully allocated to invoices or not refunded are considered to have an available balance.

Payment settings

On the Payment settings screen, you indicate how your organization accepts payments. You can choose to accept online payments as well as manual payments, or just handle all payments manually.

To display the Payment settings screen, click Finances under the Settings menu, then click Payment settings.

Manual payments

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If you don't want to accept online payments, you can click the Payment system drop-down and select the Manual payments option.

With manual payments selected, you can only manually record offline payments. You can choose the currency to be used on your site (and in your reports), and add payment instructions to be displayed to your visitors. You can choose a predefined currency or enter your own custom currency. If you enter your own custom currency, you must specify the currency name, code, and symbol.

Online payments

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If you want your site to accept online payments – including online credit card payments – you must first set up an account with a supported payment provider. Then, from the Payment settings screen, click the Payment system drop-down and select your online payment system.

As well, you can use CRE Secure – which is not a payment provider but a payment service that acts as a middle man between Wild Apricot and your payment provider – to process payments through the following payment providers:

Chase Paymentech Orbital

First Data

Litle

NMI

Orbital Enterprise

PayLeap

SagePay

SkipJack

TSYS Transit

USA ePAY

eProcessing Network

If you have already set up an account with one of the payment systems supported by Wild Apricot, you can click on the appropriate link above to jump to instructions on setting up that system on your site.

If you do not yet have an account with any of the supported payment systems, see Online payments for help selecting the best option for your organization.

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* Support for the payment systems marked by an asterisk is being provided without full testing in a live environment. During this initial implementation – the beta release – certain features such as recurring payments and automatic refunds will not be supported (with the exception of PayPal Payflow Pro, for which recurring payments are supported). For more information, see What does "beta" mean?.

Selecting country and currency

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You must select the default country you want to display to customers, and the currency you want to use in your transactions (and in your reports). The currency you choose should match the currency used in your online payment system account.

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Do not change the currency after recording any payments. If you change the currency, existing payment records will not be recalculated and will no longer display correct amounts.

Adding payment instructions

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Towards the bottom of the Payment settings screen, you can enter payment instructions to be displayed to visitors to your site explaining how to use the online or offline payment methods.

You can add different kinds of instructions to be displayed on different screens.

You can filter the list to display certain types of transactions, or transactions within a certain time period. To filter the list by transaction type, click the Filter list and choose a transaction type. To filter by date, click the Date filter list, or enter your own date range in the calendar controls, then click Apply.

You can further filter the list by entering a Search string to be matched. Only records with the specified string will be displayed.

The following options are available from the Payment & refunds screen: